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Gregg Buchbinder, CEO of EMECO, and Eames Demetrios of The Eames Foundation, both experts on authentic modern design, joined Dwell Deputy Editor Jaime Gillin on Sunday, June 24 at Dwell on Design to address the controversial topic of design knockoffs.

For this week's "Three Buildings" column I turned to industrial designer Gustavo Fricke. We featured him and his Oaxaca shop Blackbox in our July/August issue's Design Finder ("Hecho in Oaxaca," online here). He currently lives in San Francisco and has traveled a fair bit, so I was curious to hear which three buildings inspire him most. Sure enough, his picks span the globe, from Mexico City to San Francisco to Paris.
When asked what unites the three buildings he selected, Fricke replies: "Since I was a kid I've been fascinated by science fiction. Science fiction explores future scenarios that push the boundaries of our imagination. These three buildings, too, allow for the projection of the imaginary—for the representation in our present time of a future world to come. They are props of a future possibility, frozen in time."

We're thrilled to announce a recent addition to the Dwell on Design lineup: BRAVOS, an exhibition featuring emerging design talent from Spain. Meredith MacKenzie covered the exhibition back in March, and in the slideshow that follows, catch a few of the highlights.

BRAVOS: Groundbreaking Spanish Design will debut at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC on April 2nd and will remain on view until May 15th. Thanks to BRAVOS, American audiences will be able to catch a glimpse of the latest works of twenty-one of the most talented and successful people working in Spain, including experimental pieces by young designers like Nacho Carbonell alongside works by more established figures such as Martín Azúa. Curated by design expert Juli Capella, the exhibition shows the remarkable diversity of styles and techniques emerging from Iberia. Have a look at some of our favorite works in the following slideshow.

Confetti System is two friends—Julie Ho and Nicholas Andersen—who make their living creating festive and kaleidoscopic "party systems" out of tissue paper, sparkly mylar, and more. They've created confetti, shaggy geometric pinatas, and garlands for the likes of J.Crew and the band Beach House, and sell their rope-y metallic necklaces at Opening Ceremony and Bergdorf Goodman.

Browsing through the San Francisco shop General Store recently, I noticed some highly covetable, bulbous glass globes filled with tiny succulents: terrariums by the local designer Katie Goldman Macdonald, of Botany Factory. Macdonald works with Evan Kolker, an Oakland-based glass artist, to create organically shaped glass forms, which she fills with mini-gardens that are nearly self-sufficient, requiring only sunlight and occasional spritzing. My kind of gardening!

We trekked to San Francisco's foggy Outer Sunset neighborhood to check out Woodshop, a collective of four artist and designers who came together through a shared interest in craft, design, and surfing. The studio consists of Luke Bartels, who creates custom furniture from local hardwoods; wooden surfboard maker Danny Hess; Josh Duthie, who reinvents old chairs with new ideas; and the artist and sign painter Jeff Canham. After I poked around the front showroom (open by appointment only), Bartels took me around their 2,100-square foot woodshop and studio, one of the coolest workspaces I've seen.

When Tyler Hays founded BDDW more than a decade ago, the company wore many hats: depending on the project, it might be a design-build construction company, a recording studio, an architecture firm, or a furniture business. Over time Hays narrowed BDDW's focus down to furniture—"that's the scale I prefer to work in," he says—but he's kept his own interests remarkably broad. "I've got literally fifty hobbies," he told me over the phone, when I called to chat about one of his sideline projects: making exquisite, and exquisitely expensive, custom record players and speakers for audiophiles, under the name Phila Audio Corporation.
Hays defines 'audiophile' as "a person who likes to spend too much money on stupid audio equipment," and he counts himself among them. He's been making high-end, handmade audio equipment since college, but now that he's got a fabrication shop, he makes every part of every piece of equipment, down to the bearings, excluding the motor and stylus on the record players and the drivers on the speakers.